Monthly meetings are held on the second Tuesday of each month at 7:30 PM online at this link
Join us at RavenCon April 24-26. We'll also have telescopes there for daytime and evening viewing.
PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 9:25 a.m. PDT (12:25 p.m. EDT) Friday to begin a five-year journey to Jupiter. . Juno’s detailed study of the largest planet in our solar system will help reveal Jupiter’s origin and evolution. As the archetype of … Read more
News release from NASA about images of asteroid Vesta: NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, the first ever to orbit an object in the main asteroid belt, is spiraling towards its first of four intensive science orbits. That initial orbit of the rocky world Vesta begins Aug. 11, at an altitude of nearly 1,700 miles (2,700 kilometers) and … Read more
SkyDay Night at the Science Museum was apparently a hit. The Museum staff recorded over 300 visitors for the evening event and the majority of them (if not more) visited our telescopes deployed by the Kugel in front. On behalf of the Science Museum, Leslie Bochenski passed along a note of thanks expressing the Museum’s … Read more
The Science Museum of Virginia will be hosting a special evening event on July 15 from 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM called SkyDay night. The Museum will have special IMAX Theater shows, Live Science shows and demonstrations. The Richmond Astronomical Society will have its regular monthly skywatch in support of the event augmented by our … Read more
RAS recognized two winners at the 2011 Metro Richmond Science Fair on Saturday, March 19.
Terry Barker made the presentation of two $50 checks to Vijay Govindarajan of Godwin High School, for his project “Developing an Alternative Earth-Based Lunar Regolith Simulant for Future Space Exploration,” and to Ashley Hedberg, also from Godwin High, for her project “On the Use of Moon Illumination as a Predictor of Barometric Pressure.”
Dark matter is our best explanation for why galaxies stay together when they don’t seem massive enough to keep up gravitational attraction. But now a largely-dismissed alternative theory has some actual proof backing it up. This could get complicated.
Scientists using NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have detected beams of antimatter produced above thunderstorms on Earth, a phenomenon never seen before. Scientists think the antimatter particles were formed in a terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF), a brief burst produced inside thunderstorms and shown to be associated with lightning. It is estimated that about 500 TGFs … Read more
Image of the GIANT solar eclipse, with a special present included!
The singularity is here–run http://ow.ly/37PC8 Scientists have said that these temperatures are actually 1 million times hotter than the surface of the sun. http://ow.ly/37PxO #astronomy
The RAS Fall picnic was definitely a success. Thanks very much to Tim Streagle and the Heart of Virginia Scout Reservation for use of the facility, for supplying grilling equipment and for providing such a great stargazing venue afterward. Thanks also to Prashant Reddy for coordinating the event and the menu and making sure that everything went smoothly.
The weather was great and the evening was a lot of fun. It was wonderful to see everyone.